Tag: arginine

The first patient has been treated in a groundbreaking medical trial in Ottawa, Canada, that uses a combination of stem cells and genes to repair tissue damaged by a heart attack. The first test subject is a woman who suffered a severe heart attack in July and was treated by the research team at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI). Her heart had stopped beating before she was resuscitated, which caused major damage to her cardiac muscle.

The therapy involves injecting a patient’s own stem cells into their heart to help fix damaged areas. However, the OHRI team, led by cardiologist Duncan Stewart, M.D., took the technique one step further by combining the stem cell treatment with gene therapy.

“Stem cells are stimulating the repair. That’s what they’re there to do,” Dr. Stewart said in an interview. “But what we’ve learned is that the regenerative activity of the stem cells in these patients with heart disease is very low, compared to younger, healthy patients.”

Stewart and his colleagues will supply the stem cells with extra copies of a particular gene in an attempt to restore some of that regenerative capacity. The gene in question encodes an enzyme called endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). Nitric oxide is a small, gaseous molecule that is made from the amino acid arginine by the enzyme nitric oxide synthase. Nitric oxide or NO signals to smooth muscle cells that surround blood vessels to relax, which causes blood vessels to dilate and this increases blood flow. In the damaged heart, NO also helps build up new blood vessels, which increase healing of the cardiac muscle. Steward added, “That, we think, is the key element. We really think it’s the genetically enhanced cells that will provide the advantage.”

The study will eventually involve 100 patients who have suffered severe heart attacks in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.